Dana Glaser

The 20th century was rocked by a series of historical events that challenged the public to face the unimaginable: whether that meant finding language to absorb the violence of the Holocaust or articulate a connection to a history of enslavement, conceptualizing the potential for mutually-ensured destruction created by the atomic bomb or imagining environmental catastrophe. For some writers, the unimaginable has demanded that artists and writers find starkly unadorned ways of documenting it; ways of showing the public that what has happened is in fact real. At other times, the reality of the unimaginable could only be captured by the imaginary: American writers invented forms of writing the real that were absurdist, surreal, increasingly turning to innovations in genre fiction. How did these writers shape or reshape a sense of history as it was happening? What styles of writing are closest to the real? How does the fantastical grapple with history and testimony? The syllabus will pair texts that take documentary approaches to the major events of the century with those that use unreal and surreal ones. Possible pairings include John Hersey's "Hiroshima" with Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, Chester Himes' A Rage in Harlem and WEB DuBois' The Souls of Black Folk, Truman Capote's In Cold Blood with Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire with Robert Lowell's Life Studies, Octavia Butler's Kindred with Angela Y. Davis' Women, Race, and Class. 

From the iconic militant images of the Black Panthers sporting afros and slinging rifles to the street theater of the Yippies, the melodrama of bra-burning, and the parodic extremity of Valerie Solanas’ SCUM manifesto, the moment of the 1960s and 1970s is as synonymous with certain kinds of style as it is with radical politics. Often, the former to the detriment of the latter: the more style, the less substance: for example, the counterculture’s tuning in and dropping out depoliticized the student movement and the Black Panthers’ star power is “radical chic” that undermined the seriousness of their willingness to use revolutionary violence. Why did political activists write and perform their politics this way? What made these politics radical – that is, what is it about them that rethought something from its roots or foundations? Does radical style always suggest a radical politics? This class mixes cultural history, political theory, and literary approaches to the moment of the new social movements of the 1960s. We’ll read the serious political texts that invented modern ideas of race, sex, gender, and class politics as having style of their own, and we’ll read them alongside the film, poetry, theater (street and otherwise) that made characterized the 60’s. We’ll also make good use of archives in Chicago, which was one of the primary centers for New Left political activity, and students will have a chance to do firsthand archival research.